BBC news 2009-10-22 加文本

BBC 2009-10-22


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BBC News with Fiona McDonald.

The head of the UN nuclear agency Mohamed ElBaradei has given Iran and three world powers the text of a draft deal aimed at reducing concerns about Iran’s nuclear programme. The IAEA wants Iran to allow most of its uranium to be shipped abroad for further enrichment before being returned for use in a civilian research reactor. Jon Leyne reports

The deal would mean Iran gets the fuel it needs and stays off pressure for more sanctions. The outside world sees Iran’s enriched uranium taken out of the country and processed in a way that will make it more difficult for Iran to make nuclear bombs. But Iran’s still not signed up publicly on the crucial element, the shipping out of Iran of its precious stocks of enriched uranium, and that could be hard for the Iranian government to accept, in light of the prestige President Ahmadinejad has attached to the nuclear programme.

The United Nations says Afghanistan’s burgeoning production of opium is having devastating consequences around the world, killing more people than any other drug and funding criminal groups and terrorists. Bethany Bell reports.

The UNODC says more people die from Afghan opium than any other drug. It said the trade in Afghan opium caters to 15 million addicts and causes up to 100,000 deaths every year. It said in NATO countries the number of people dying from heroin overdoses is five times higher than the number of NATO troops who’ve died in Afghanistan in the past eight years. The head of the UNODC Antonio Maria Costa says it would be cheaper and more efficient to tackle the problem in Afghanistan itself.

Most of the schools and universities across Pakistan are to stay closed until Sunday after six people were killed in a suicide attack at the International Islamic University in the capital Islamabad on Tuesday. Only the universities in Sindh province will reopen on Thursday. The Taliban said they carried out the attack and warned there would be more violence unless Pakistan ended its offensive in the tribal areas of South Waziristan.

Two of the world’s biggest polluters, India and China have announced they’ll work together on addressing climate change. They are to take a common position in global negotiations for a new climate change agreement at Copenhagen in December, but there are fears their approach could lead to disagreement of industrialized nations. Here is Matt Mcgrath.

Both countries see a continuation of the Kyoto Protocol as a key part of the Copenhagen talks. That agreement made the world’s richest countries solely responsible for cuts in CO2. In recent negotiations, the United States has been saying that simply signing up to Kyoto or son of Kyoto is not a realistic option for them. They and other countries want a new type of agreement that ties the larger developing nations like India and China into legally binding commitments to cut or modify their use of carbon.

World News from the BBC.

The former boss of one of Colombia’s most successful drug cartels has been sentenced to 45 years in prison after pleading guilty in a Miami court. Diego Montoya was accused of importing 10 billion dollars worth of cocaine into the United States after he became leader of the Norte del Valle cartel in the early 1990s.

Prosecutors in the American state of Massachusetts have charged a man with conspiracy to carry out terror attacks at a shopping center and on US troops overseas. Tarek Mehanna is alleged to have planned with three accomplices in 2001 a series of attacks and to have actively sought over the next seven years the training and weapons needed to carry them out. Mehanna and two of his associates are alleged to have travelled to the Middle East in a failed bid to get training at a terrorist camp.

A row is continued over a new book written by the president of Congo-Brazzaville, Denis Sassou-Nguesso, with a foreword supposedly written by Nelson Mandela. The Nelson Mandela Foundation says he didn’t write the words and hadn’t even read the book. It says it will take action over its publication. Thomas Fessy reports from Kinshasa.

An advisor to the Congolese President Sassou-Nguesso told the BBC that it wasn’t for the Mandela Foundation to decide what the Congolese president could or could not publish. The advisor, who didn’t want to be named, claimed that what was presented as a foreword had been said by Nelson Mandela himself in Cape Town when Sassou-Nguesso returned to power in 1997. The advisor to the Congolese president said he was furious at the Mandela Foundation’s reaction.

The US dollars continued to sharp decline against the euro and some other major currencies amid further indications that confidence is returning to global financial markets. The dollar fell to $1.50 against the euro, its lowest level for more than a year. And it is also slumping against some emerging market currencies, including the Brazilian real.